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Copy & IMAGES Australasian dentist
SVRadiology chooses
Planmeca ProMax® 3D Mid
as total solution
St Vincent’s Dental Centre (SVDC) is a private dental practice
located at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne. In addition to
the centre’s private patients, SVDC provides special needs dental
34 consultation to several large hospitals in the East Melbourne area.
In that capacity, Dr Harris Schlen, the principal of St Vincent’s
Dental Centre, and his CBVT purchasing team at SVRadiology
have accumulated substantial experience in utilising advanced
Making the decision to buy pathology and radiology services and have been referring patients
for CTs for many years to aid in investigation of pathology and
a CBVT is not a difficult task medical conditions, and more recently in treatment planning for
but selecting the right one is. dental implants.
When you buy a car, you take They initially utilised medical CTs from the radiology services
within the hospital but as cone-beam CTs which were better suited
it for a test drive. The same to dental applications became available, progressed to referring to
cannot be done when buying radiology groups with CBCTs. However, Dr Schlen says they had
become frustrated with the variability of the quality.
a new CBVT since there is no “We tried referring to various providers utilising different types of
way to “test drive” the machine. equipment, and soon found which were the most reliable but we never
So how do you decide which consistently achieved the results we were looking for. We also noted
that medical image reporting commonly lacked an understanding
one is right for you? of dentistry.”
They determined that they needed their own CBVT to achieve
the outcomes that they wanted. Together with a group of dentists
and radiologists, they set up SVRadiology at St Vincent’s to provide
specialist head and neck imaging with a dental perspective.
“We were well aware of the pitfalls of setting up such a service.
We didn’t want to create a service that would leave us with the same
compromises that we were already exposed to which would leave us
with a major financial commitment and no real advantage.”
Armed with a basic knowledge of CBVTs and a wish list that they
had developed, they approached the major players in the market both
in Australia and overseas and presented their wish list.
